


The Fall

by therescuingtype



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-20
Updated: 2014-04-20
Packaged: 2018-01-20 04:19:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1496431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/therescuingtype/pseuds/therescuingtype
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve finds him in the winter. It’s almost a year since SHIELD fell, since Hydra went underground. He knows they’re out there, but they’re laying low. Mostly, there are no stories of The Winter Soldier. Not even rumours. Steve knows that’s good, for Bucky, but it makes his job harder. But he finds him, because he always would. Because Bucky needed him to. Because Bucky wanted to be found. He’s sure of that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Fall

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first MCU fic I've ever written because I have a lot of feelings about Bucky Barnes. I'm not done with this pairing yet, and I'm not sure how I feel about the ending of this one, because I've already mentally moved on to like 3 more fics. Be nice. :)

Steve finds him in the winter. It’s almost a year since SHIELD fell, since Hydra went underground. He knows they’re out there, but they’re laying low. Mostly, there are no stories of The Winter Soldier. Not even rumours. Steve knows that’s good, for Bucky, but it makes his job harder. But he finds him, because he always would. Because Bucky needed him to. Because Bucky wanted to be found. He’s sure of that. 

It takes a lot of coaxing, and a fight they both know their hearts aren’t in - the last time they fought like this, Steve broke Bucky’s arm. This time, there’s hardly a scratch on either of them. The truth is, there isn’t much fight left in Bucky.   
Steve brings him back to Washington. For the first three months he stays holed up in his apartment. It takes a lot of begging Fury to let him stay that reminds Steve of the time he and Bucky found a litter of puppies in an alley and begged their parents to let them keep one each. Bucky’s parents caved. Steve’s didn’t. This time, Fury does, after screaming at Steve for days about why the hell there is an assassin living in his apartment.  
“C’mon, let me see him,” Tony begs almost as soon as he finds out. “I bet I could fix him. Get his memory back.” He’s eating something out of a plastic bag, blueberries probably, and he pops one into his mouth. He chews while he studies Steve expectantly. Come on Steve. Let me play with him. I’ll fix him, probably. You’ll have your buddy back. But Steve shares an apartment with Bucky. He’s heard him, out on the living room on the couch, in the middle of the night. He’s heard the screams, and, almost worse, the quiet muttering, the pleading. Some of Bucky’s memory came back on his own, and he told Steve on his first night about the Wipes, about the shock therapy that made him forget. Again and again and again. Steve can’t bear the thought of Bucky strapped into another machine, poked and prodded and who knows what. He’ll help Bucky recover his memories on his own.

When Steve gets home, Bucky is sitting on the couch, watching TV. It’s a bad soap opera, which has, to Steve’s chagrin, been one of the few modern pieces of pop culture to really grab Bucky’s attention.  
“Hey Buck,” he says casually, tossing his keys into the tray he keeps by the door. As irritating as he finds the show Bucky’s watching, he has to admit it’s nice to come home to noise in the apartment - to come home to someone. He never realized how quiet it really got in there.   
Bucky turns and offers a half-smile in return. He’s been doing that lately, that half-smile. It seems to Steve that it’s getting bigger, more complete as the weather warms up outside. “What are the good people of Salem up to today?”  
Bucky clicks off the TV as Steve comes around and sits in the chair opposite the couch. “Scheming. Cheating. Lying. All things the mighty Captain America would never stand for.”  
Steve laughs, and drops his head in mock embarrassment. Bucky smiles, a real, genuine smile. It’s a nice moment, but when Steve looks up again his eyes catch, just for an instant, on Bucky’s left arm.

Two days into his stay with Steve, Bucky co-opted one of his hoodies and Steve isn’t sure he’s taken it off since. He’s wearing it now, the sleeve pulled down over his metal arm, balled tightly in the clenched mechanical fist, the arm cradled gingerly in Bucky’s lap.  
“Your arm okay?” he asks as casually as he can. Bucky looks down at it then, as if just remembering it’s there, and clenches and unclenches the metal fist inside the sleeve. He rolls his shoulder.  
“A little stiff,” he says. That’s not it, but he’s not ready to talk about that with Steve yet. He remembered some more things last night. Or he dreamed them. He’s not sure which, but the things that arm probably did...  
“You know, if you come by the tower sometime, Tony’d take a look at it for you,” Steve suggests gently.   
“No,” Bucky protests. “No way. I am not an experiment...”  
“I know Buck,” Steve says gently. He reaches out, places a hand gently on Bucky’s forearm. It feels too hard and he nearly recoils, but he can’t let Bucky see that. When it’s covered in that sweater, he almost forgets what it’s made of. That it isn’t his real arm. And then he feels guilty, because he knows Bucky never can.

It isn’t about being an experiment for Bucky. He was, more or less, for 70 years. He knows the difference between Hydra’s sadistic experimentation and Tony’s genuine curiosity. He’s not ready to be around Steve’s friends. It was bad enough during the war, being reduced to Steve’s sidekick. Now Steve is a hero, and he’s nothing but a terrorist. 

That night Steve is jerked suddenly out of sleep by a commotion in the living room. Suddenly alert, he leaps from bed and dashes out of his room to find Bucky thrashing wildly on the couch. One of the cushions is clenched in Bucky’s human hand, the robot one tearing at it. It doesn’t stand up for long before half the living room is covered in white fluff.  
“Bucky,” Steve says, gently at first - he knows how disorienting it can be to be woken suddenly from a nightmare. Bucky doesn’t respond; another cushion meets the same fate. “Bucky!”  
“Not again, not again,” Bucky mumbles. “Don’t wipe--”  
“Bucky!” Steve’s voice rises; he doesn’t mean it to. He grabs Bucky’s wrist - the flesh-and-bone one - and squeezes. Bucky’s eyes shoot open - was he even really asleep, Steve isn’t sure - and his metal hand grabs Steve’s, nearly crushing it.  
“Do not touch me,” he hisses. Their eyes lock. It’s the same emotionless, soulless, dead look Steve saw on the bridge a year ago, when he first realized The Winter Soldier was Bucky. When he first realized Bucky was alive. But just like then, there’s no recognition.  
“Bucky, it’s me,” he says softly. Bucky’s cold metal fingers clench and twist on Steve’s wrist, but he doesn’t let go, doesn’t let himself wince, just keeps his eyes locked to Bucky’s.  
“Come on, Buck,” he urges gently. “It’s me. You know me. You’re safe.”  
Bucky’s chest heaves with laboured breathes, but slowly his glare softens, his eyes seem to warm as recognition spills over him. It looks like waking up.   
“Steve,” he whispers. Steve smiles a small, relieved smile.   
“Yeah, Buck, it’s me.”  
Bucky releases his grip on Steve’s wrist. Steve immediately slips his arm out of view; he’s sure the bruising will already show. Bucky doesn’t seem to notice; he’s looking around the apartment like he’s seeing it just now for the first time. The shredded remains of Steve’s couch cushions are scattered like a late snowfall. The couch’s frame is cracked, probably from the sheer force of Bucky’s nightmare-fueled thrashing.   
“I killed your couch.”  
Steve smiles again and pats Bucky’s shoulder. Bucky glances down at his hand; most days he struggles to remember how they used to be, but he knows this gesture is somehow both familiar and alien. It hits him that it’s supposed to be reversed, that he should be the one reassuring Steve.  
“You wanna tell me what that one was about?” Steve asks. Bucky’s hair is matted with sweat to his forehead and Steve has the urge to wipe the long strands away. He doesn’t, though: Bucky doesn’t always trust a gentle touch not to hurt, and Steve’s pushed his luck this far.  
Bucky licks his lips. He can taste the rubber of the bite guard, feel the machine clamping around his head... worse than all of that is the crippling unwillingness to even fight it. Because after a few dozen wipes, it just wasn’t worth it. There were things he wanted to forget, after all.  
“Not really,” he replies.  
Steve sighs. “Well, you’re gonna need somewhere else to sleep, c’mon.”  
He takes Bucky’s hand and stands to lead him to his bedroom. Bucky glances down and sees the purple bruises forming on Steve’s wrist where he’d almost crushed it. If it had been anyone else he would have. If it had been the old Steve, he would’ve torn the hand right off. He pulls away.  
“I don’t need to sleep.”  
Steve sighs and sits next to Bucky on the broken couch. It creaks under their weight.   
“I didn’t sleep much either when they first thawed me out,” he says. “Felt like I’d already missed too much. And I didn’t wanna accidentally wake up in another 70 years. That’s not gonna happen to you, ok Buck? No one’s putting you back in cryostasis.”  
Bucky bites his lip and doesn’t look up. He’s still thinking about the bruises on Steve’s wrist. He doesn’t tell him that at least in cryostasis he didn’t dream. Or that he couldn’t hurt anyone.  
“Come on, Buck,” Steve says again. He stands, this time just watching Bucky expectantly. “I would put the couch cushions down on the floor, but that’s not really an option.”  
He keeps his voice light, but Bucky still closes his eyes, drops his head, tears at Steve’s heart.  
“Look, it’s a big enough bed...” he says slowly. Bucky looks up.  
“Share the bed?”  
“Yeah, it’ll be like when--”  
“--when we were kids,” Bucky nods. “I remember.”   
Steve smiles. It’s big and genuine and it makes Bucky smile, smaller but just as genuine. He likes it when he can make Steve smile. He knows he’s done well when he remembers things. He doesn’t want to sabotage Steve’s smile, so he stands, and follows him into his room. It’s only when he lies down - on his side, his metal arm curled up under him, as if the weight of his body can stop it doing any more damage tonight - that he realizes he’s shaking. Steve notices, obviously, and lays down behind him, sliding both his arms - both his warm, real, human arms, Bucky notes - around him. Slowly, Bucky’s breathing steadies, his chest stops heaving, and his body relaxes, even leaning back, just a little, into Steve’s.  
“Buck,” Steve says, his breath hot on the back of Bucky’s neck. “You’re gonna have to shine my shoes until you pay off that couch, y’know.”  
Bucky grips Steve’s arm, not hard enough to bruise this time, as Steve’s arms tighten around his waist.

As summer comes in, Bucky seems refreshed, revived, almost like the pre-war Bucky Steve remembers. It’s too warm for the hoodie now, but now, Bucky actually has some things of his own. He still doesn’t go outside much - the world still knows him as a tool of Hydra, and the metal arm tends to put people off - but now he’s usually wearing a tank top, the arm glistening in the sunlight streaming in through the window (Steve is allowed to open the shades now without Bucky hissing almost comedically at natural light). Steve leaves earlier now for his morning runs, because it’s lighter out. Some mornings he tries to convince Bucky to join him, says he’ll go easy on him, says Sam will be there to keep pace. His teasing is a little too jovial, a little too loud, just a little off, and Bucky declines. Most mornings though, Steve is long gone before Bucky even wakes up. He still can’t quite get the hang of nights, still can’t quite shake all the nightmares.  
He wonders about the things he might say in his sleep. 

By August, he’s taking proper care of himself again. He eats real meals, and he’s discovered Thai food with Steve. He works out now: pushups on the living room floor, mostly, and he’s taken a renewed interest in proper care for the metal arm, particularly in cleaning the scar tissue around where his shoulder turns to metal. Some days he wakes up with the smell of necrotizing flesh in his nostrils - usually after a dream about his first days with the arm, strapped to a cot, needles everywhere and Hydra scientists poking and prodding him - and he’s worried there’s an infection.   
Steve isn’t entirely sure why the sight of Bucky carefully cleaning and polishing the arm, flexing it and testing its multitude of functions, sends shivers down his spine. Bucky’s eyes haven’t gleamed like that since before the war. 

Meanwhile, it’s been two months since Steve replaced the couch in his living room, but Bucky hasn’t moved back onto it and Steve won’t ask him to.

September rolls towards its end with shorter days and darker mornings. Bucky has ventured outside a handful of times, either very late or very early. He likes Washington, when it’s quiet. Car horns set him on edge, the noises of a busy city remind him too much of combat. He runs now too, the arm hidden away under a jacket, its computerized whirring reminding him that it’s there - just in case.   
Steve is still gone most mornings when he wakes up, and it worries him. He’s easy to find though: doing his laps of the reflecting pool while the sun comes up. How cliche.   
“Well well well, look who it is,” Steve says as Bucky joins him mid-lap.  
Bucky can keep pace with him now, for a while anyway, and that makes him feel strong. He doesn’t say anything, and they fall into a gentle run, two hearts pounding against chests, for two entire laps. Bucky steals a glance once or twice at Steve, and he hopes it’s just his eyes playing tricks on him, like the way he sees panicked fleeing in regular rush hour traffic, but he swears he sees faded yellow bruising on Steve’s neck. There have been no missions for weeks; nowhere for Steve to have gotten hurt. Steve Rogers doesn’t even get hurt. But Steve Rogers has been sleeping next to The Winter Soldier...  
Bucky presses forward, feeling the burn in his legs, pulling ahead of Steve, who does nothing to catch up. If anything, he drops back. That fuels the fire inside Bucky, and he runs until his lungs feel like they’re going to explode.  
Steve finds him collapsed under a tree, panting for air, staring up into the lightening sky.  
“You wanna tell me what happened back there?” he asks. It’s like he’s talking to a subordinate. Maybe one of the Avengers. Not to his best friend. Not to Bucky Barnes, who was always the bigger, stronger one, the leader.   
“Why do you come out here every morning?” Bucky asks. His tone is almost accusatory. Steve sighs and drops into the dewy grass beside him.  
“Haven’t needed much sleep since the serum,” he lies.  
“You’re full of shit,” Bucky says. “Don’t give me that super soldier bullshit. I’ve seen you sleep like the fucking dead after a mission.”  
“And you never did.”  
“Yeah, well, not all of us were the moral centre of the entire United States military,” Bucky practically spits. “Some of us had to fight. And kill.”  
He pulls himself up, flexing his metal arm - a show of power. Steve doesn’t say anything. He just stares at it, jaw clenched, and it’s all Bucky needs to confirm what he already fears.  
“You’re still too dumb to walk away from a fight,” he whispers. “One of these days it’s gonna get you killed.”  
He curls his metal fingers, deliberately but slowly, into a metal fist, squeezing with enough force to crack bone, but there’s nothing there. This time. Steve flinches, almost imperceptibly, and it’s all Bucky needs. He stands, and Steve stands too - a little hesitant, a little late.  
“You need to walk away from this fight,” Bucky says. He points, this time with his flesh-and-bone hand, to the bruising on Steve’s neck. Steve touches it absently. “Or you’re going to end up dead.”  
“It isn’t your fault, Buck.”  
“I’m a killer, Steve.”  
“But it isn’t your fault. They made you-”  “Who’s making me now?” Bucky asks, growing agitated. The metal arm at his side is flexing and unflexing. Steve’s eyes flit to it now and then, and for the first time in seventy years he looks like the skinny kid from Brooklyn that Bucky remembers - really looks like him, not just in the eyes, those eyes that belong to his old friend but live inside someone Bucky doesn’t really know. This is Steve Rogers, who won’t show fear and won’t back down, who’ll fight for what’s right until it kills him.  
“Why do you let me stay?” Bucky asks. “In your apartment. In your bed.”  
“Because sometimes,” Steve says, swallowing hard. “You talk. In your sleep. The things you say... I don’t want you to wake up from that on your own.”  
Bucky rolls his eyes, but he doesn’t look back at Steve, instead casting his gaze low and to the left. It does help when Steve’s eyes are the first thing he sees after a nightmare, Steve’s touch the thing bringing him back to the world. But he knows more often than not it’s immediately preceded by his cold metal fingers closing on Steve’s neck. He doesn’t ever remember that part, or Steve prying them off, and he doesn’t want to.  
“Why do you let me nearly kill you?”  
Steve sighs, thinks about his answer, chooses his words carefully. “Because you haven’t. Because you didn’t when you had the chance. Because you could have let me drown after Insight, and instead we’re both here. A year ago, you were the Winter Soldier, but I knew Bucky Barnes was still in there. This isn’t even my fight, Buck, it’s yours. And you’re winning.”  
Steve hears the whirring in the cybernetic arm before Bucky even moves. He’s heard it at night, been pulled from sleep from it, and it’s the only warning he usually gets before Bucky, in the grip of another nightmare, lashes out. This time he has enough time to step back - the punch isn’t aimed at him anyway - before Bucky rears back, winds up and swings the heavy metal arm, fist clenched tight, into the trunk of the tree. There’s a cracking sound and wood splinters off in all directions. Bucky unfurls his fist, pressing his palm flat against the trunk and drops his head. Steve gives him a second, enough time for three heaving breaths, enough time for the tension to leave his back, the whirring to stop and his shoulder to slump. Then he places a hand carefully on Bucky’s shoulder, his thumb gently brushing the highest metal scale, his palm pressing against warm flesh, and squeezes. Bucky grips Steve’s wrist and in a single fluid motion, a motion that could have been deadly a year ago, he pulls Steve in and swings his metal arm around his shoulders, squeezing him against his chest and dropping his head onto Steve’s shoulder. He doesn’t let go for a long time, and Steve won’t make him. 

After all, he decided a long time ago that he wasn’t going to fight Bucky Barnes. And he’s not about to start now.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Падение](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1979880) by [efinie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/efinie/pseuds/efinie)




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